Lego Saboteur
Sometimes, playing with Lego can help to build a team. A few days ago, Mike burst into the office, telling us to jointly re-construct a model out of Lego he had previously placed in another room. The rules were that we needed to do this in 20 minutes or less and that only one person was allowed in the other room at a time. To complicate things, he had asked me (Steve) beforehand to play the role of saboteur and to change the original model a little bit every time I went into the room.
Making our first mistake, the only thing the team agreed upfront was that we should each take a look at the model first. And just as soon as we agreed on this, each person went into the room, came out, and started building a piece of the model. Someone suggested that we each handle a specific area of the model, but this idea was only loosely followed. We spent most of our time queuing to get into the shower room and I spent most of my time moving the pieces around, trying hard not to make any clicking noises.
But we did even worse. Five minutes into the exercise, Mike told the team that one of us was sabotaging the project by moving pieces around. Accusations started to fly. I thought about how the team was going to root me out. Some of us continued to build, some decided to sit and some thought about trying to root me out. I just made sure that I timed my changes in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. The team continued to try to build and compensate for the changes the saboteur was making.
When the exercise had finished we were asked to guess who the saboteur was and to explain our rationale for choosing that person. Jo guessed first and had to explain her rationale for choosing Ludwig. Luckily I had to go second and also chose Ludwig, explaining that he had followed me into the room on one occasion and that I had gone in again after him and saw that he made a change - a great lie! Tom and Stew named Ludwig, too. Ludwig, to his credit, chose me, saying that I had been too quiet and was being rational throughout the exercise.
With or without a saboteur, we made a total mess of this exercise. We did not make a plan. We did not deal with adversity. We did not work as a team. We realized afterwards that one person could have recreated the model accurately within the time period given without any help from the others. Needless to say that we need to do better when we tackle the real model.
February 14th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Hi
My dad edited many innovation leaders for 40 years at The Economist including The Entrepreneurial Revolution Trilogy begun 1976, completed 1984
Both economics and innovation have diverged from what he expected the internet’s most human uses would be, as you can see from this priority for the next decade http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html#Anchor-Changin-27687 economics is also far away from transforming above zero-sum in the way von neumann whose biography he wrote assumed we’d wish to map for our childrens’ futures
Inspired by Sir Nick Stern, we have been collecting ideas around 5 revolutions that are now needed of the 1% 20% kind - beyond climate; liberating the poor world’s women; empowering children through wholly new educational modes (my first job in 1973 was for the UK’s National Development program in computer assisted learning) and we ain’t practised any of the best ideas for children empowered learning yet!; ending rsiks at boundaries of networks; media reforms geared to covering humanity’s deepest heroes in ways accessible to youth not just pop and sports idols
We believe we are a good way along an innovation curve on how to do this though it always helps to hear from more people are committed to turning round these sustainability crises, because different red stripes can bring different fast trachks to the table
ps pass on my regards to chris or Kristie -hoping you all have a great social media event